<<YaMaKan.Org>> Geo-Storytelling for peace making?
A couple of days ago, that was a Christmas day, A new initiative for Syria was published. If Christmas is about memories and stories and gifts, then this must be the best time to give, i thought.
Background:
For those who can not recognized it in the first place, or can not count anymore, Syria has been going through a big social and off course humanitarian transformation for the past -almost- 10 years. What started as a peaceful revolution back in March 2011, was responded to with an excessive use of power by using all kinds of brutal terror-state practices to mute Syrians and set them back to their idle mode they were oppressed and forced to live for the past four decades before the revolution. Well, this is at least my narrative about what i lived. And it is supported with evidences. Materialized ones. And coincidently you will hear the same narrative by millions of Syrians. A sort of a collective story narrated by people coming form different places, with different ideological backgrounds, different social and economic classes, different education, different careers, different genders, different sexual orientations, different music tastes, food tastes, hobbies, dreams and memories.
I want here to emphasise a critical thought and then i want to address how we can counter it and mitigate the risks associated with.
Contemporary conflicts and wars, are not anymore only about materialistic gains and loses. It is more and more about symbolic ones. Warfare are taking place more online because those are digital ‘SPACES’ too. And in those less-tangible spaces, the importance and value of symbolic artefacts are more obvious and influential. In that sense, discursive practices are integral conflict practices. It has always been like this, discursive practices are vital to struggle of powers. But Marx’s relative failure in predicting devastating and horrible class-based conflict was later explained by Gramsci who elegantly drew our attention to the top-down institutional practices in disseminating ideologies. He explained to us how power-held institutions contribute hegemonic discourses aiming at socializing people and making them obedient. Mass media is one of the main instruments of such discursive injection. With the social media designed systems and the many-to-many communication models we went into a new power-turn historical phase of discursive practices.
Un-Puzzled
Now if we put the two pieces of the puzzle, my first paragraph about Syrian narratives and the online discursive practices we realize the power of discourses in conflict times.
Narrative is important to life. We do it everyday. We tell stories everyday, we listen to them, we experience them, we live them. Narratives are temporal. They are about events that took place. Narratives are not events themselves, they are the narrators’ versions of those events told as stories in different formats. In that sense, interpretation is a vital element to narrative and that is where narratology or the science of narrative comes to discussion.
As my work focuses on the role language plays in conflict, it is my job to continuously try to come up with solutions that enable better access to naturally occurring language. I also focus on the link between language and memory. I am here glad to announce we have launched few days ago our new platform: YaMaKan.org : an online collaborative space where narrative is used for conflict resolution in war zones. Syria is the case here. The project is an innovative multidisciplinary approach combining three fields of : Naratology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Semiotics.
YaMaKan.org
The concept of the project is really quite simple. We are brining the concept of storytelling and meshing it with the geographic information system (Google Map). The foundation is also quite basic and simple: Nostalgia and memories. Ordinary citizens displaced internally or not, refugees outside Syria or not, pin there memories to places they had connection with in Syria on a google map. They share with their friends and family members those memories. It is simply remaining truth to one’s own self.
Through this project we introduce a new possibility to narrate conflict through narrating life around conflict too. There are multiple objectives here. First, it is to help Syrians and Palestinians-Syrians remain linked to the places they had lived and had memories with. Second, it is to help making the voices of ordinary citizens heard. Third, it is to self-discover and re-discover identity elements. Fourth, it is to approach trauma and post trauma alternatively through narratology. Fifth, it is to resist history forging and demographic changes and ethnic and religious cleansing that come with conflict. As you can read, this will lead to peace making. Truth, reconciliation and peace.
Without communication there is no peace. This is what i always find out. And the Syrian conflict and any conflict is no exception. There will always be -reasons- for one party or another NOT to communicate but that will never be helpful. Most of the crisis in the world come from that unfair position some would take. Peace needs communication. War is anti-communication. For those envisioning peace-making facilitation roles in this life, an important task will always be to create and facilitate communication through all possible media and platforms.
As this is a non for profit project that is launched in Christmas day as a gift to Syrians in their struggle for liberty and justice, we look for your kind contribution -non financial- to this project. We would like to hear you through the project’s ‘contact’ tab in our website. But before doing so, kindly read about the project at the home page.